Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

“Hanuman Nagar.”

“No, no,” she said—he had misunderstood, thinking she’d asked him where he lived. She rephrased the question: “Were you watching them?”

“I was watching you, madam.”

He faced her squarely, not smiling, looking intently at her.

“Thank you.”

He did not blink. He said, “Since you arrived at Agni, I have not stopped watching you.”

That made her pause, and she was at a loss to reply. She had felt giddy, joyous at having been rescued from the monkeys. But now she felt awkward—unaware of the young man’s gaze, she had been observed. He was forcing her to concentrate, as though this episode was not over yet, something more was required. He was hovering.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said. “Please take this,” and she went back to her bag by the chair and took out some rupees. They felt like cloth in her hand, they were so worn.

“Oh, no, madam,” the young man said, and put his hands be hind his back in a prim gesture, complete with a show of dimples.

“Isn’t there anything …?”

“Yes.” He was quick. Already he had control of the situation. “You can request me.”

“Request you?”

“For treatment,” he said. “Ask for Satish.”

The slow drip of hot oil on Audie’s back, the pressure and heat, suggested her fingertips, and when she drizzled the oil in widening circles it was as if she were caressing him. The brass pot was set down on the heater with a clunk and then he felt her hands. She did not say much, had only greeted him, and she hardly spoke unless he asked a direct question. Yet there was a confident intelligence in her hands as they moved down his back, a wise inquiry in the motion of her fingers. She was able by touching him to find parts of his body that, until that moment, were unknown to him, and so her insinuating hands awakened a knotted muscle, her thumb rested on it and pushed, giving it life.

“That’s nice.”

Anna paired her thumbs and pushed again, swiveling downward along the meat of his spine, gliding through the oil to the small of his back.

“You are having this in America, sir?”

“Doubt it.”

She went silent. Perhaps she hadn’t understood his grunt. She worked harder, still on the bundles of muscles next to his spine.

“I would like to go to America. Where is your home, sir?”

He did not say: That’s a hard question—we’ve got a place in Florida, an apartment in New York, a house in Maine …

“I’m from Boston,” he said. “Near Boston.”

“Boston Tea Party. Boston Red Sox. Boston beans.”

He laughed into his towel, then raised his head and asked, “Ever been outside of India?”

“Only to Delhi, sir. School trip, sir.”

That reminded him of how young she was. He said, “You could probably make a lot of money in the States. Doing massages.”

“But also to meet people, sir. To be happy, sir. To be free, sir.”

“You’re free here, aren’t you?”

“No, sir. Not free. It is very hard here for me. As I mentioned, I am Christian, sir.”

She was now working on his right arm. She had begun on his shoulder, squeezed and pressed her way to his wrist and was massaging his palm and, one by one, his fingers. Her manipulating his fingers he found to be like an act of the purest friendship, more sensual, more intimate, as she pushed and pulled, than her touch on any other part of his body. Take my hand, he thought. It meant everything.

“Wouldn’t you be afraid to be in the United States alone?”

“Oh?” She was holding his fingers with one hand and kneading his palm with the thumb of her other hand. The way she touched him told him she was thinking. “Maybe I will find someone to look after me.”

“Give you money, you mean?”

“I will earn it, sir.”

His throat thickened at the implications of what she said. He asked, “What would you do?”

“I can do so many things, sir.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I have training, sir.”

“Lots of girls have training.”

“But my training, sir, is not in school.”

“Experience?”

“Experience, sir. Best teacher, sir.”

“That feels nice,” he said. “But can you do the hardest thing of all?”

“What is that, sir?”

“Keep a secret?”

She had begun to stroke his other arm. She held it as if it were detached from his body; she weighed it and traced her fingers down his forearm to his wrist as though evaluating it. Then she caught his fingers and brushed them against her body, he could not tell where—her softness, her warmth, perhaps her breast or her smooth cheek.

“Oh, yes, sir. I can do that, sir.”

He was aware that he had had this conversation many times in his life, the flirting, the allusion, the euphemism, his earliest talks with girls as a boy of twelve or thirteen, and almost fifty years on, the same innuendo, the same themes—like a language he’d learned early in life, a second language that was used exclusively between a man and woman, the language of suggestion, never quite coming to the point yet always knowing what the point was. He delighted in this inexplicit talk.

“Sir?”

“Yup?”

“Please turn over, sir.”

“Not just now.”

She sighed in approval. She knew he was aroused and embarrassed. He could not turn over without exposing himself, bulging against the covering, lifting it at an angle, his conspicuous desire.

“That is all right, sir.” She was trying to be serious.

“Give me a minute. I’m happy.”

“I want to please you, sir.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Thank you, sir.” She leaned against his back as though embracing him, but using her elbow, her forearm, her fists on his packed muscles. She was canted over him, resting on him, her breath warming his shoulders and neck. Because he was faced away from her she seemed bolder, and what aroused him again was his suspicion that she knew the effect she was having on him.

“Did you learn that in school?”

She did not hesitate, she pressed harder, her whole body upon him.

“No, sir.” He could tell she was smiling. “In life, sir.”

For a few days, Audie and Beth found reasons to be busy, to remain apart at the very time when, a week earlier, they would have been punctually together, looking at Agni and its people—guests and staff—and agreeing with each other: at the pool, in the restaurant, in their suite, at yoga, awaiting a treatment, poking golf balls across the putting green, side by side.

Now, “I guess I just missed you,” Beth would say, as a way of explaining her all-afternoon absence.

“That’s okay,” Audie would reply. “I was tied up longer than I’d expected.”

Each was grateful for the other’s casualness, since in the past they’d seemed to agree that solitude was selfish. But their absences were an unexpected relief, and the fact that they did not need to explain them to each other left the absences ambiguous, almost without meaning, as in other years when, late home from the office, Audie had said, “I was held up.” On many of those occasions he’d been with a woman, his secretary, someone from the company, the wife of an employee.

Beth somehow knew but hadn’t asked, since asking would have made it real, more serious than she imagined it to be. And Audie, in the wrong, was thankful to her for giving him the benefit of the doubt. Because he did not examine these affairs, kept them in the dark where they were enacted, they vanished, and apart from certain moments, the bitterness mainly, even the memory of them was gone. Only in the reveries of the treatment room, being massaged, flirting obliquely with the therapist, did he remember. And in the week when Beth had begun to say that she’d been held up—“Just missed you”—he was calm. He owed her that much.